Day: August 7, 2016

Marketing a book on a budget is a time-tested problem for authors. More and more self-published authors are reaching out to bloggers to drive visitors to their books.The question is – does it work? Remember it isn’t always sales that indicate success, exposure is just as important.

A book blog tour in any form takes dedication and hard work. Whether the payoff is great enough to cover the time you put into this venture is up to each specific author. To maximize the benefit of any blog tour, it is best to have different information for each site.

Standard Blog Tour

A standard blog tour usually runs for one to two weeks and spans several blog sites. The number of websites involved is up to the individual arranging the tour. Prearranged content is published at scheduled times on each site during the tour.

Book Blog Tour Blitz

This is basically the same as a standard blog tour, except rather than having the prearranged content appear on different days, it is published on each site at the same time on the same day.

Merry-go-round Blog Tour

Everyone participating in this type of blog tour is both an author and a blogger. Posts are made on a schedule of one day for each different author. If ten authors are involved the tour will last ten days. The schedule is flexible based on the needs of the group. It can be decided to make one post per day or one post per week. Every blog has a different author to feature for every day of the tour. This provides traffic to both the author’s works and the blogs. Please make sure you have the time to be involved. This type of tour is founded on equal participation.

Paid Book Blog Tours

If you are low on time and don’t mind spending your hard earned money, there are sites who will organize a blog tour for you. You’ll still need to do the research to find the best sites to use, and provide your book information, but the actual finding bloggers will be taken care of.

Important information

Join groups and get to know bloggers before approaching them to feature your book. You may want to sweeten the deal with a small amazon gift card for them to give away. Keep in mind bloggers are trying to gain readers. If your book doesn’t mesh well with their themes, it is unlikely they will agree to be involved.
Bloggers and their readers tend to be a little more critical and in some cases quite picky when writing reviews and handing out ratings. You will be opening up yourself to accepting the good and the bad.

Make sure you thank the people who post on their blogs for you. Use social media and your own blog to give some recognition.

Thanks for reading – Join me next week when I take a look at read and review groups.

Last week we took a look at adding Thunderclap to a marketing plan. This week, we’ll be discussing the only real competition in crowdspeaking platforms – namely Headtalker.
The basic ideas behind a Headtalker campaign is the same. You create a personal message that you want to be seen by a large number of people. There are, however, a number of things that are different to take into consideration.

1. All campaigns are authorized within 24 hours of submission.

2. The platform is free. There is no need to upgrade to a better package. They are all the same.

3. The minimum number of supporters needed is only 25. This number can be increased if you wish to an number of your choice. You could choose 26 or 42.

4. There is more control over your platform. More changes are allowed after the campaign is live.

5. There are four types of social media that can be used to support a campaign, adding Linkedin as an option.

6. Each type of social media counts as one supporter. That translates into the ability of one person to count as four separate supporters towards your goal.

There is a marketplace for buying or selling support. Prices start at $5.00 and go up. The more famous the person or the bigger their social media reach, the more expensive their support is.

7. They have a number of twitter accounts that support a campaign as soon as it goes live. It is possible to start with up to ten supporters within a minutes of campaign launch.

8. With the social reach boost to start off a campaign, it is almost certain to be listed as trending for at last the first day on the home page.

9. There is room for visitors to comment on the campaign page.

From my personal experience, the minimum goal of 25 supporters isn’t going to give you enough reach to be useful. In my opinion, you are better off to ignore the initial boost in social reach numbers and set a higher goal for supporters to rival Thunderclap numbers.

It may seem like a good idea to run both crowdspeaking campaigns at the same time. Keep in mind you have to find supporters for both campaigns. Overlapping the same social reach will give you very little benefit. Leave some time in between campaigns.

Both forms of crowdspeaking have their merits. It’s up to you to decide if one or both fit well in the plan you have for marketing your work.

Join me next week, when I take a look at Blog Tours. Thanks for reading.